"We're All Flat-Chested. Otherwise, We Wouldn't Need to Be Feminists."

The sudden prominence of breasts is either an emblem of empowerment, the fruit of technological advance, or a symbol of the new culture of falseness that pervades the corridors of power. Or maybe it's just a cause for celebration.

A few years ago, the following conversation occurred between a San Francisco radio-talk-show host named Chris Clarke and a caller named Gregory.

Gregory: I have a friend who recently had breast reconstruction after having undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer. She was upset because, for the time being, she was not allowed to get the silicone implant and had to stick with the saline. As it turns out, she is very pleased with the saline. But this gave rise to an interesting point. Another friend pointed out that in politically conservative, repressive times, big breasts on women become very popular, and in liberal, freewheeling times, small breasts become popular.

Clarke: What age are we entering into now?

Gregory: Well, clearly we are in a repressive age.

Clarke: So there are going to be larger breasts.

Gregory: Yes, based on my friend's theory. For example, the fifties were a very repressive age, and we had Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield. The twenties were a very wild age, and small breasts were popular. You see, his theory is that in a repressive age, people feel the need for nurturing. That's why big breasts become popular.

Gregory: It's not that "Political times are repressive, ergo we like big breasts" but that "There are a lot of big breasts around, ergo we get scared and we get conservative." And, conversely, like in the sixties you had people like Penelope Tree and Twiggy, and people looked around and said, "Oh, there's lots of small breasts around -- it's okay, it's safe. I'm going to join a commune and take drugs."

The theory has its pros and cons. Personally, I don't remember the sixties as a small-breasted era but rather as one when the profile of the breast shifted from the coniferous to the deciduous (hence Penelope Tree). The belief that behind every predominating political climate stands a more or less prominent breast is, however, a theory that is definitely an example of man's age-old quest to ascribe a larger meaning to breasts. If it is true that big breasts cause conservatism (paging Dick Morris), the current climate bodes well for Republicans. This is a big-titted culture. After dipping precipitously following the FDA ban of silicone implants amid charges that leakage causes autoimmune and connective-tissue disease, the number of breast augmentations recorded by the American Society for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery has increased 275 percent in the last five years, making it the most rapidly expanding procedure of any cosmetic operation for which statistics are kept. The Wonderbra, introduced in the States in 1994, immediately gave rise, as it were, to a number of copies, imitations, and variants and continues to sell at a brisk clip, with 1998 retail figures of $100 million. Curves -- a high-tech silicone falsie, which also immediately gave rise to a number of copies, imitations, and variants -- has sold more than five hundred thousand pairs, generating $50 million in retail sales.

In short, regardless of whether we vote with our breasts, they are a uniquely marketable body part, both attached to the individual and freestanding. Breasts have a potential for symbolic meaning unequaled by even the primary sexual body parts. Breasts are big business, metaphysically and physically, and big business does have its say in government.

The last time falsies and padded bras were this popular -- a period that peaked in the fifties and flattened out in the seventies -- it was because there was an atmosphere of sexual conservatism and an all-around culture of concealment that necessitated a breast that repressed and returned simultaneously. This time, in a culture in which it has recently been demonstrated that sexual mores have relaxed not so much to the point that there is a less prurient attitude about blow jobs as to the point that it's okay to use the term "blow job" when expressing your prurience publicly; in which pro wrestling is not only one of the country's most popular forms of entertainment but a sometime training ground for politics; and in which a seemingly heartfelt nationally televised confession that practically nobody believes is more effective than a charge of perjury that practically no one doesn't, falsies have found their metier. This is a culture in which seeming to reveal something appealing, even if it's obviously false, is preferable to revealing something ugly, even if it's obviously true. This is a falsie culture.

Although it didn't really begin to snowball, or snow cone, as the case may be, until the fifties, the application of modern technology to the breast for the purposes of a purely sexualized enlargement actually began in the forties with the bra designed by Howard Hughes for Jane Russell in The Outlaw. This simultaneously hoisted the breast and left its shape intact. Walter Winchell referred to breasts as "janerussells," and I think it is a measure of the greater variety of choices available to women in the postfeminist era that if he were around today, he might be unable to choose between "gretchenmols" and "pamelaandersons." Certainly, over the last decade and a half, you are far more likely to see a woman in an everyday context with her gretchens fully molled than at any other time in modern American history.

Nevertheless, traditional anxieties about breast size persist. This is true not only in feminist but in popular literature, one good example being Nora Ephron's well-known 1972 Esquire cri de coeur, "A Few Words About Breasts," which expresses a basic feeling of inadequacy about being flat-chested and would not look the least bit out-of-date if it were printed in Marie Claire tomorrow. To read Jacqueline Susann -- and, by the way, if there were a Mount Rushmore of movers and shakers of the breast as a cultural artifact in the latter half of the twentieth century, she'd be on it, right alongside Hugh Hefner, Madonna, and Helen Gurley Brown -- you'd think that having breasts (cf. Valley of the Dolls) was a tragedy almost on a par with not having them (cf. The Love Machine). For Susann, it was. She died of breast cancer, and in her fixation on size as destiny in the context of this other, more literal destiny -- one in nine American women now contract the disease, in itself a staggering statistic -- she also foreshadowed the age.

The flat-chested has its place in the fashion world, where the shape of the garment, rather than the shape of the body, is what counts. But even within the slender subcategory of supermodels, it is the curvier, more traditional glamour girls like Cindy Crawford, Laetitia Casta, and Claudia Schiffer, rather than the more willowy mannequins whose names you don't know, who usually have the mainstream appeal that is necessary for domination of the wall-poster industrial complex. Barbie, Betty, and Veronica, all still popular figures in the lives of little girls, have breasts that start at their shoulders and end at their rib cages, just above the waist. In fact, I would say that if there is one thing that feminism has had no impact on whatsoever, it is body image on an individual level.

That the size distinction is still considered to be decisive was recently evidenced by no less an authority on the neoclassical sexual paradigm than the president. Monica Lewinsky (whose relationship with Clinton was at least as much about breast play as about blow jobs) described a "very emotional" visit to the president in which he was more affectionate toward her than he had ever been, stroking her arm, toying with her hair, kissing her neck, praising her intellect and beauty, and assuring her that the harassment allegations concerning Kathleen Willey were untrue, because "he would never approach a small-breasted woman like Ms. Willey." I was asked not long ago how feminists feel about that statement. We hate it. Because we're all flat-chested. Otherwise, we wouldn't need to be feminists.

Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein posited that the infant accommodates conflicted feelings about the mother's breasts by dividing his or her perceptions into two categories: the good, nourishing breast and the bad, denying breast. Popular culture over the last half century has not been that generous. Despite developments in the arena of sexual representation, you have always had your dumb breast, and you have always had your mean breast. Ever a reliable go-to guy when it comes to any kind of misogyny, Philip Roth in 1972 wrote a novella called The Breast, a work that is efficiently summarized on its back cover as "the story of the man who turned into a female breast." In it, he characterizes his new form as "a big, brainless bag of dumb, desirable tissue, acted upon instead of acting, unguarded, immobile, hanging, there, as a breast simply hangs and is there." This view, the breast as dumb blond, has gone almost completely out of fashion as the classical cream-puff style of dumb blond -- the dumb blond who was too dumb to know that you were fucking her -- has given way to the ditzy, less sexual dumb blond, like Suzanne Somers, who was the master of her own thighs. While not exactly friendly (all human tissue is brainless, with the obvious exception), Roth's attitude is not as hostile as it could be, either. You can get the upper hand on a dumb breast. A dumb breast is also a safe breast.

While the dumb breast wanes, the mean breast waxes. The all-around abuse, the veritable shit storm that rained down upon Demi Moore and Elizabeth Berkley during that little convulsion in breast history that was the release of those twin-peak monuments to the breast, Striptease and Showgirls, could essentially be summarized in these words: Mean breast. Bad, mean breast. Down, breast, down. As with all things known to God and man, the mean breast was first seen in its nineties incarnation on Madonna, with the wearing of those big, missile-shaped bras and with the publication of Sex. Madonna was also the popularizer of the breast as partially unwrapped present, which has progressed from bra or slip showing to bra or slip as outerwear. By some, this is viewed as the equivalent of a random sex crime, the mean breast reversing Roth by acting rather than being acted upon: I feel assaulted by breasts. Hey. Get a load of the leopoldandloebs on her.

In a social context, however, over the last half century or so there has been a persistent belief that women are pursuing an agenda with their breasts, more or less malign but definitely about power. The dumb breast of the forties and fifties had its power corollary, sort of like a superhero persona, in the extrasexual dimension of the seamed and ultrasupported fifties-sitcom maternal breast. This was not always benevolent, since its power was such that if you weren't careful, it might become overbearing and cause you to start a secret affair with your movie-star girlfriend's adopted teenage daughter forty years later. If breasts are involved in any way, it doesn't matter what other power agenda is being attempted, as the next decade's focus on bra burning, as shorthand for a movement that was not primarily about lingerie, somewhat depressingly demonstrates.

Appropriately, as the liberation politics of the sixties and seventies morphed into the apolitical I'm-okay-you're-okay personal-growth movement, the free breast gave way to the perky breast. This period, which foreshadowed contemporary baby-tee, cotton-camisole bralessness as practiced, say, by Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary, can be described in four words: Farrah Fawcett-Majors's nipple. The eighties, which started the briefly interrupted rise of the implant, was the era of the power breast, sometimes grafted onto an aerobicized hardbody, sometimes contained within a power suit, whose era it also was.

Finally, as this decade slouches toward the millennium, the marketplace has approached with a bright smile and a tastefully striped box of tit and encouraged the breasted part of the population to stand up straight, stick its chest out, and slip in a pair of Curves. This is not the power breast. It is the empowered breast.

Let it first be said that Curves ("Hollywood's Best-Kept Secret") are, pound for pound, the best bargain in this sector of the market. Two thickly opaque, hollowed-out prosthetic breasts, complete with nipples, they come in one of two colors, peach and mocha, and one of four sizes: demi, small, large, and extra large. They have their own little habitat, molded to contain them, which has an initial L in the left corner and an initial R in the right corner and looks sort of like the contact-lens container of the breast-faced man in that Magritte painting your acid-damaged roommate had in college.

It is only right and just that any one of half a million women walking past you tomorrow might be wearing Curves. In consumer-reports terms alone, this is an awesome product, beyond comparison the way to go if what you want is to appear to have larger breasts when clothed. Even if you have no use for falsies, I think you should order a pair and leave the box open on your coffee table at cocktail parties. Watch as your guests chortle and knead! Both practical and surreal, a little like Duchamp's urinal, Curves look realistic not only at rest but also in motion. They're comfortable to wear. And they are creepily authentic to the casual touch, hug, or even cursory feel-up. A commonplace at fashion shoots, they are also used on such breast-defining shows as Baywatch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Beverly Hills, 90210.

It is the further genius of Curves to market itself not as something you do to catch a man but as something you do for yourself, to express your inner breast. "I have to fit into a lot of molds and feel good about all of them," says one woman during the Curves infomercial, a sort of combination jiggle show and motivational video. "I know that Curves give me the extra confidence for all the roles we play during the day." This theme also appears on the Wonderbra Website, which has a Virtual Empowerment Page from which you can send virtual postcards with pictures of Sarah O'Hare, Wonderbra model, cavorting and leaping about in a bra, panties, and high heels, just like you and I do when we feel personally empowered. "Share that self-confidence and initiative with someone who needs it," urges the text. "Pick a pix, choose a note.... Send your messages of support and understanding to friends and family. You have the power. Spread it around!" I think that as soon as you have ordered the Curves, you should rush right on down to the nearest topless joint and shout that at a stripper. Someday, it's going to replace "Show us your tits!" Try to make that day now.

Nietzsche believed that great breasts can overcome reasonable bounds of convention and morality. Or maybe that was great minds. In any event, the Curves infomercial does not go quite that far -- for example, it does not suggest that Curves constitute a valid legal defense, at least not for a felony -- but it comes close. To watch the Curves infomercial, which not long ago deservedly won the infomercial equivalent of an Academy Award, is to realize that the difference between the padding Nora Ephron grew up with, which was based on women being sold the notion that a larger bosom was a quality whose value was absolute, and the natural, realistic form of the Curves ethos is that while the former was an obligation, the latter is a right. "It seems so many women are forced to limit their wardrobe because they don't like how they look in a particular outfit," says the spot's host, Laura Lewis -- a point that I believe was also raised by Nietzsche.

"I've had many women call and say they wear their Curves with their Wonderbra!" says Julie Sautter, creator of Curves, in her infomercial.

"You can do that?" asks Lewis.

"Sure!" replies Sautter.

Basically, except for the lucky few, Curves are superior to the unenhanced breast in every way and in every situation, except the one that has troubled falsie-wearing women since the Fall. But Sautter suggests that the moment when the falsies come out is the test of true love, so if that bothers you, you're probably just not empowered enough.

Of course, not everyone is buying the concept of cleavage as a motivational tool, a thing women use to put a bounce in their steps as well as in their breasts. Some people can see right through your cotton-camisole-clad falsies, even if they are opaque. "If you're hot, you do like the people in Bahrain, where it's 100 degrees by 10 a.m.," opined one letter to the editor regarding a newspaper article about scantily clad women in the summertime, in which some had cited comfort or said they just did it for themselves. "You wear long, flowing robes so you're shielded from the sun and get maximum air circulation.... The real reason girls show a lot of skin in the summer is that the heat creates an excuse to show off a body, fleetingly in its youthful prime.... You put on a halter top, you say, 'God, I look fabulous in this,' you think about how you'll be sixty in no time and won't be able to incite male lust, and you put on the halter top and shorts and walk out the door." You are, by my count, now wearing two halter tops, but never mind. Despite this letter writer's contention regarding what people really do when they're hot, most people are not actually advocating purdah, but neither are they as comfortable with the idea of the revealed female form as something with strictly self-reflexive empowering qualities as Wonderbra would like them to be.

This is a good thing for the skin-magazine industry, which in order to survive requires that there be at least some prurience that can't be expressed in the mainstream culture. But porn does face more of a challenge from traditionally higher-production-value media in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue than it used to, and this has led to two loosely related developments: the rise of the amateur and the return of the natural breast. In the world of skin magazines, where a woman is her breasts, the overwhelming trend is not only toward natural but emphatically against implants.

Perfect 10 is the brainchild of a man whose official masthead title reads, "Norm Zadeh, Ph.D." Its fall issue is 113 pages of gorgeous young women with beautiful breasts posed on balconies and rocky outcroppings. These are accompanied by brief Q&A's with each girl, in which she can reveal her fondness for languages, love of family, or amount of progress toward her economics degree.

The Perfect 10 girl is also empowered by having perfect breasts, actually. According to Zadeh, one of the things that sets the Perfect 10 girl apart is that she is very smart, unlike most of the Playboy Playmates, who are low-quality strippers. He also says -- and I think this shows that the doctorate is in economics rather than in breasts -- that one of the reasons implants are bad is that they send a message that tells the average woman she's not good enough the way she is -- logical enough in itself, but not totally compatible with publishing a magazine full of women who look like the ones in Perfect 10. And he says he thinks men tend to prefer smaller breasts, although for some reason small breasts don't photograph well. He has a Perfect 10 contest video on which you can see "the models at their finest" as they compete in the fifty-yard dash, a potato-sack race, topless basketball, and an implant toss for distance, among other activities.

Zadeh wishes more people in positions of power would come out in favor of natural breasts; one person who has is Dian Hanson, who edits Juggs as well as Leg Show and a magazine called Tight, which, in her words, caters to the sad fantasies of aging baby boomers. Hanson's office walls are decorated with, among other things, a six-breasted, Chernobyl-inspired prosthesis and -- I know this is off-point, but it did stand out -- a drawing of a man with antlers who is bound, gagged, and wearing a sign that says, I am only a man, a mere proof of the woman's superiority. "I don't think that the fact that breasts can be seen more does anything to take away people's desire to see breasts," says Hanson. "I know that breast men find not just arousal but comfort and relief from anxiety in the breast -- from fondling the breast, the warmth of the breast, resting their head on the breast, suckling the breast. There are men who prefer small breasts, but they're not men who prefer breasts; they prefer that breasts not get in the way."

Hanson believes that the ubiquity of implanted breasts in skin magazines and topless joints was a trend powered, if not empowered, by curiosity: "When they started making the mega-augmented breast, there was an interest; because it was so cartoonishly fascinating, the men wanted to see them. But then, as they went to strip clubs and saw them, and saw them begin to deteriorate and deform, and they began to see the obvious scars, the horror factor took over, and it occurred to them that these were not soft breasts. And the trend just evaporated." Hanson, like Zadeh, tries to persuade models not to get augmentations.

Back in the real world, more women who want to be perfect tens (or who want to be known for their jugs) get implants every year. So far, the trend toward the natural breast is confined to the realm of the sex professional, and on the street an honest tit is hard to find -- you must, you must, you must increase your bust, whether by implant or, as they say, explant. And although the Curves infomercial, for all its emphasis on self-esteem, does identify the women whose lives have been changed not only by name and occupation but also by marital status, the days when the Cosmo girl squared off against the Playboy bachelor in a breastic battle over whether she could make him buy the cow or he could make her give up the milk for free are nominally gone. Today's amazon is supposed to own her breasts, not cut them off or trade them in for a diamond or use them as an advance guard as she soldiers through life, because she is not oppressed by her breasts nor armed with them but empowered by them. Her femininity is a falsie that hides in plain sight. Her bra tells her her place, and it's the corner office. She just can't get there following a straight line. She needs curves.